Copyrighting — Podcast Interview with Jonathan Graves

Below you will find an easy to read transcript of Jonathan Graves’s interview on the razorcast™ monthly podcast. You can either watch the video to listen to the podcast or simply read the easy to follow transcript below. Enjoy!

Podcast Interview

RC: Hello everyone, this is Liz Harvey coming to you from our razorcast™ studios in New York City where we are dedicated to bringing you top quality advice from many of the leading expert professionals across the United States.

In today’s episode, we are speaking with Jonathan Graves. Jonathan is the founder of Local Gold, a digital marketing company based out of New Jersey. He is most known for helping over 3,000 USA business clients drastically increase their new leads while simultaneously building massive goodwill within their marketplace.

Jonathan is widely considered by many to be one of the top internet marketing professionals in the country. He is also the co-founder of razorcast™ and serves on our national network of professional contributors.

Today we are going to talk about a very important topic: Copywriting

Hi Jonathan, how are you today?

Jonathan Graves: Hey Liz, how are you doing?

RC: I’m doing well. Thanks for being here today.

Jonathan Graves: Thanks for having me, appreciate it.

RC: Great, thanks.

Question 1: What are your thoughts on long vs. short advertising copy?

RC: Jonathan, we hear a lot of arguments for long versus short advertising copy. What are your thoughts on this topic?

Jonathan Graves: There is always constant debate, long versus short copy. I’m a big fan of short. We live in a different world today; 65% of the traffic we’re seeing on the internet is coming from mobile. Obviously, long copy has its place – the fifteen page sales letters and stuff. But, I’m just more of a fan of short. Easier to get to work. You can test it a lot quicker. You don’t need to be an expert copywriter to get out there and start seeing results.

I think it’s a different world. Long copy has its place but from what I’ve seen in the market, it really needs to be targeted towards a very hungry market that is trying to accomplish or learn from or do what the writer of that copy is trying to educate them on.

So when all else fails, I’m always a fan of sticking with it short. Our attention span is a lot shorter these days. Getting in, getting out. Doing the best you can to get their contact information and follow up with them with additional communication at a later date.

RC: Okay that sounds great.

Question 2: Why would a U.S. business owner need to care about copywriting?

RC: Why would a U.S. business owner need to care about copywriting?

Jonathan Graves: Well, it really all comes down to ROI – the return on investment of your advertising dollars. Copywriting in its essence is about performance of your ads and increasing the results that you receive from your advertising because more people will be interested in it and take action from the ads. So it allows you to spend less on advertising to get more results and more leads.

So it’s a couple simple tweaks. For example, in your copywriting and in your ads, in your copy from your opt-in pages to your ads, to all of your sales processes. That can help increase the pulling power of your advertising by over 350%. It’s proven. I see it each and every day. We’re constantly testing our ad copy and seeing drastic results from the results of that optimization.

For an example, there’s really three parts to the copywriting that you can tweak.

You can tweak your ad copy. That’s the copy of the ads that’s driving new people into seeing your offer.

You can increase the copy on your opt-in pages. People are opting in on those pages to learn more and give you their contact information in exchange for that information.

Also your final sales copy. The sales of turning them into a new client or patient after they’ve opted in.

So just to run through some examples of how powerful this is; I don’t think people really understand how powerful copywriting is. Let’s just say you show your ad app to 30,000 people in your area over a month. If you were to get 1% click through rate from that ad and drive 1,000 yields of roughly 300 visitors to your site and then if you have 4% of those visitors opt-in. You’d have 12 leads from your ad. Then if you were to close say 20% of those leads, you’d yield roughly 2.5 – 2.4 new clients or patients a week from that ad.

Are you following me Liz?

RC: Yes, definitely!

Jonathan Graves: I know I’m kind of talking fast but I really think this is important to go through.

Okay so now, let’s say you make some tweaks to your ad copy and now (your ad – nothing crazy) you’ve increased that ad click through rate from 1% to 2% – which now yields 600 visitors from that ad. Now your opt-in rate, because you’ve changed some of the copy, went from a 4% to 8% – which would drive 48 leads and now you increase your closing rate by increasing your ad copy from 20 to 30%.

Just those little tweaks to both your ad copy, your opt-in page and your sales process can go from yielding 2.5 new clients or patients a week to over 14 new clients or patients a week, just by making some simple tweaks.

All you changed was converting the click through rate of your ads from 1 to 2%, very reasonable. Your opt-in rate from your opt-in page from 4 to 8%, extremely reasonable. And, your close rate from 20 to 30%, again extremely reasonable… all numbers that we see every day with our testing.

So advertising copying – copying is very powerful and in essence, it’s about getting a higher ROI from your ads, driving more leads with less advertising expenditure and getting more of a return on your investment from your hard earned advertising dollar.

RC: Okay, well that’s really great!

RC: The next question which I think everyone wants to know the answer to is, do business owners need to hire a professional for this? Do you need somebody with an MBA in writing or is this something you can learn on your own or within your own team?

Jonathan Graves: I think you can learn it on your own. Again, if you stick with the short copy and don’t try to write these long sales letters, then you don’t need to be a pro. For the longer stuff, you really have to be a pro because there is an art to it.

But if you stay short (keep it short and sweet) and just make a commitment to being fast (being fast to market and testing and making optimization changes off that, really anybody can learn it. It’s not that difficult. There are a couple proven formulas which I can go through in a minute if you’d like some of our formulas. But if you keep it short and then just make a commitment to testing it.

All you need to do to test is you need tracking phone numbers on it – which are very cost effective. You can use a free google analytics tool and then you have CRM system that you’ll use to track the leads that you get. We use Infusionsoft; there are a number of them out there. You name it there are a dozen of them. It really doesn’t matter which one you use.

But if you just have a unique tracking phone number, google analytics which is free and then a CRM, you’re off to the races. You can test it.

So keeping it short and sweet, you’re not going to need to really hire and outsource an ad copy man or woman unless you wanted to get into long copies which are an entirely different animal.

Question 3: Do you have any easy to implement ad campaign formulas you can share?

RC: Okay and building ad campaigns. I know there is a lot that goes into it. Do you have any ‘easy to implement’ formulas that you can share with us?

Jonathan Graves: That’s a very good question. There are a lot of them out there. Books and books are being written about copywriting so I don’t want to over-complicate the process or make it more difficult than it has to be. It’s the first step in our Growthstart Formula which we published in bestselling books and we put out there on TV interviews and stuff that we’ve been using for years and it works.

Really the first part of that is creating a master marketing message and within that master marketing message, there are four steps to a successful ad. First being your hooks, the second being triggers, third being educational value and then fourth you’re creating irresistible offers. You can do this all within a small quarter page ad in a newspaper or a Facebook ad with a landing page. You can do it across any marketing median. But there’s a datonomy to this and any kind of the infrastructure remains the same regardless of the media it’s being put on.

So your hooks essentially are the headline and that addresses the biggest problems or desire of your marketplace. If you’re a chiropractor, you want to address back pain, neck pain, the biggest problem that they have or the biggest desire which is to live a pain free life. So that’s just one example for one industry. But you really want to address in your hooks, just get their attention with problems and desires and you do that via headlines.

The triggers – what triggers do, they essentially mentally draw your prospects into your ads by engaging them to learn more and entice them to take action and that action is essentially just tuning into your ad. You do this by promising them a reward by continuing to read your ad and listening to your claim, visiting your opt-in page, etc. There are really two main motivations for human action. Those are either self-interest being some type of prospect of gain or fear, fear of loss, fear of missing out on an opportunity.

So the triggers – this can be a little complicated and there are books written about triggers – you want to just keep it simple and hit engaging oriented triggers that actually engage them into taking the next step and reading more about your ad. Some of the top ones are ‘new’ triggers: anything that is new out in the marketplace. Curiosity or physiological triggers that trigger that prospective gain, that fear of loss that I mentioned. Social proof triggers that are testimonials; other people have seen results. Third party verification triggers, bargains, limited time offers and exclusive offers that they can only get with you in the market.

So you have your hooks to get attention, your triggers, quickly engage. This all happens in a matter of milliseconds. Your triggers mentally engage your audience. Then, you have your educational value and really so now you’ve engaged them and they’re like “wow I’m interested in this, there is either something for me to gain or I will avoid losing something from this.” So you have your trigger, now you provide some type of educational value and that could be either free reports, videos, trials, consultations, demos. Make it very easy for this new prospect or new patient to raise their hand and want to speak with you, opt-in to your offer, contact you for a free consultation. And you do that with some type of pre-educational value which is in line with the Google promotions that we spoke about in some of the other podcast interviews.

Last (certainly not least and a lot of the companies that we see drop the ball) is to create that irresistible offer. What your irresistible offer does is it allows you to get out of being a commodity and into a one-of-a-kind solution. You do this by finding something about your product or service that is 100% unique. If you don’t have something that is 100% unique, it’s simple – you just create it and you give it some type of proprietary name. So for an example, say you’re a realtor, don’t just sell homes. Have a proprietary system that gets out there and sells homes that nobody else can use or copy such as your ‘TD3 Homes Sales System.” Now when you’re in your marketing, you’re using that TD3 Home Sales System as your irresistible offer out in the marketplace; you advertise that system. That’s something that nobody else can offer, it’s 100% unique and the leads that are opting-in are opting-in for that proprietary way of doing things versus just selling a home or getting your home listed – which they can find a thousand realtors in their local paper to help them with that same problem.

So really that formula if you want to simplify: interrupt with your hooks, you engage with your triggers, you provide educational value via your opt-ins with the free reports, consultations, demonstrations, videos, etc. Then you put the cherry on top with an irresistible offer that they cannot get anywhere else. You give it a name and you market that irresistible offer out in the marketplace. If you simplify that and follow those four steps, you’ll now have ads that engage, they capture attention with their hooks, they engage with the triggers, they’re providing value and they are also 100% unique. They can perform up to 350% better out in the marketplace than traditional ads that don’t have those simple master marketing messages within the copy of those ads.

RC: Wow, this is really some excellent information and a pretty easy-to-follow formula if you can remember those four points. So thank you so much for sharing this with us!

Jonathan Graves: No problem Liz. Try to simplify it, hopefully the best you can. If you guys have any questions, you can always call our Local Gold team and we’ll be more than happy to help you with it or point you in the right direction of how you can get this done and the resources that you can read up on if you want to educate yourself more on some of these processes.

RC: Okay, fantastic. Thank you, Jonathan. We know you are extremely busy, so I want to thank you for your time & help.

For our listeners across the country, if you are interested in speaking with Jonathan, you can either go online at www.localgold.com or call 800-850-0493 to schedule an appointment.

On behalf of our entire team at razorcast™, we want to thank you for listening and we look forward to bringing you more top quality content from our country’s leading professionals.